After John and Christine gathered a small pilot groupto draft SharePoint use cases, John reviewed them with Andrew. It was important that as the executive champion and also chief executive officer of CIEWG, Andrew was satisfied with these first use cases before the team expanded to work with other lines of business.

“These look great, John,” Andrew said as he went over John’s PowerPoint presentation. “You can start meeting with other lines of business to draw up similar use cases. Each line of business will eventually add their own use cases once they are comfortable with using SharePoint, but you need to get the ball rolling with them.”

“Sounds good. Thanks for the quick turnaround on this, Andrew,” John said as he gathered his things to head back to his basement office.

“Before you go, what’s next? Do we have SharePoint champions yet?” Andrew asked as he flipped through the initial executive sponsor pitch presentation, which included the steps to a successful SharePoint adoption.

John and Christine looked at each other nervously. “I’m going to take that as a no,” Andrew said with a chuckle. “Why don’t you encourage the three associates who helped you develop these use cases to become your champions? Keep it simple.”

That’s actually a good idea, Christine thought to herself as John nodded his head. “Absolutely, we’ll get right on that,” she replied.

Later that afternoon, John and Christine met with Bryan, Gwendolyn, and Kathy to discuss Andrew’s feedback on the preliminary use cases. After they congratulated the group on passing Andrew’s muster, they pitched the idea of the three of them also becoming CIEWG’s SharePoint champions for the upcoming rollout.

“I guess we were so good that Andrew decided to give us even more work to do, huh?” Bryan asked sarcastically as he caught up on his latest Snapchat stories.

“Don’t be such a jerk,” Kathy said. “This looks good for all of us. If nothing else, we can put this on our resumes. John, what exactly are SharePoint champions?”

“SharePoint champions are individuals throughout the company who are our ‘boots on the ground’ inspiring fellow associates in their day-to-day interactions with SharePoint,” John replied as he poured Gwendolyn a cup of coffee. “You need to build SharePoint awareness, understanding, and engagement across CIEWG.”

“That sounds like a lot of work,” Gwendolyn said as she sipped on her coffee. “I have a major upgrade taking place across my production sites that will take up quite a bit of time. Do you have a sense for what the time commitment will be?”

“As we prepare for the SharePoint rollout, you will each need to devote two hours a week to being a SharePoint champion,” Christine replied. “Once we start rolling out SharePoint in phases, it will be a three-hour-per-week commitment until it’s fully deployed across all lines of business.”

The group nodded their heads. “You may wonder what building awareness, understanding, and engagement means,” John added. “You’ll use formal and informal communication channels to build awareness and support my IT team in launch activities.”

Everyone sat silently for a moment to allow all of the information to sink in. “So, are you in?” Christine asked.

All three smiled and affirmed they would be happy to be SharePoint champions. As they all shook hands, a man with a safari-like outfit came into John’s office. “This guy is taking Casual Friday to a whole new level,” Bryan whispered to Kathy.

“Ah, perfect timing!” John said as he rose to greet the mystery man. “Everyone, this is David. He’s the director of research and conservation at the Memphis Zoo. I thought that since we’re all having to adapt to this new way of working – and have to get everyone else at CIEWG to adapt as well – he could give us perspective on how they deal with new animals who come to live at Memphis Zoo.”

As David explained how animals dynamically adapt to their environments with the help of engaged caretakers, John and Christine witnessed their three newly appointed SharePoint champions making the connections to how they can do the same for their fellow associates. There was a lot of work to be done in the coming weeks, but they were confident they finally had the right people and process in place to make this SharePoint adoption successful.